Where do I begin here, you have to know us to love us!

The beginning of the group started with my best friend and me and we added people here and there along the way and then they quickly passed through.

I don’t know if it is our irreverence to the material and our propensity to digress or the small glass of wine sitting beside us that never seems to empty.

We have read almost anything in any genre that you can think of, seriously and some that needed to be covered in brown paper and some that needed a cart to carry, some funny and some dark and some way beyond our academic capabilities.

The original group never really became a group but after my daughter’s senior trip to Germany with my friend Marilyn to help me at the time (as I was in the midst of my chemo) we found two new friends.

The diversity of the group is beyond comprehension. What we have in common I feel is our sense of compassion, humor and dedication to each other.

This then lead to a group of 4 with several more coming and going out of the group, due to moves or our lack of seriousness to the subject matter at hand. At times we have had members bring notes to review the book we have recently completed and at other times we have spent 5 minutes or less on the topic at hand.

We then became a selective group in deciding who should or could join and who really would be willing to put up with our antics.

We added yet another and then came one more. We are at six and quite content to remain as we are. We meet randomly and always the food and drinks are abundant.

We laugh so hard that often we can’t even hear what we are saying.

One of our members is a new bride and we are in awe of this romance and happiness. One is the keeper of the pets and many treasured secrets. One is so talented and creative that those of us that aren’t just ooh and ahh at everything she does. Another is multifaceted and has the most immaculate house and beautiful gardens. One has a giving heart and every coupon and sale that is known to man at her fingertips, And me, I am not sure what I am doing there.

I am not the youngest but close to it.

I am not the most talented or most of anything that I can think of. By far, I believe I laugh the most and I do believe they are keeping me around as I have the medical background to help them as they age and have the place of retreat that we all like to go to.

One late night we decided to walk the lane in the big woods where the retreat is and in the pitch black of the night, I am sure the bear, and deer and whatever other critters were around, were running to find a safe haven away from this boisterous group.

We have laughed and cried together and hung our laundry out to dry together, figuratively and literally.